California saved? (Vote fraud update)

California's Governator-appointed Secretary of State, Bruce McPhereson, was supposed to be Diebold-friendly. Very friendly. As in: Count the nation's largest state as beet red, from here to doomsday.

So what's this?

After possibly the most extensive testing ever on a voting system, California has rejected Diebold's flagship electronic voting machine because of printer jams and screen freezes, sending local elections officials scrambling for other means of voting.

"There was a failure rate of about 10 percent, and that's not good enough for the voters of California and not good enough for me," said Secretary of State Bruce McPherson.

More:

McPherson denied approval of the TSx after a series of failedtests, culminating in a massive, mock election conducted on 96 of the machines in a San Joaquin County warehouse. San Joaquin is one of three California counties that purchased a total of 13,000 TSx machines in 2003 for more than $40 million and have paid to warehouse them ever since.

For eight hours on July 20, four dozen local elections officials and contractors stood at tables and tapped votes into the machines to replicate a California primary, one of the most complex elections in the nation. State officials watched as paper jams cropped up 10 times, and several machines froze, requiring a full reboot for voting to continue.

You can find McPhereson's letter to Diebold here.

I feel a bit like Anthony Quinn (playing Auda Abu Taii) in Lawrence of Arabia. Towards the end, after getting the public apology he never expected from Omar Sharif, Quinn can only sputter: "This is a new trick!"

So what is McPhereson's trick?

Perhaps this: By rejecting Diebold machines in the voting booth, he looks clean. But he has not rejected Diebold tabulators -- the "mother mchines," as they were once memorably called. In a close election, the tabulators do the real mischief.

Billmon on Ohio. Billmon at the Whiskey Bar, after donating to the congressional campaign of Ohio Democrat Paul Hackett, offered this interesting observation:

I've been through Hackett's district -- in the heart of Ohio's hillbilly belt -- and it's one of those places where Republicans perversely thrive by meshing the votes of conservative suburbanites and rural traditionalists. Even the dying mill towns along the Ohio ignore their economic interests and vote Republican these days, although not by the same kind of margins as the two big Cincinnati collar counties -- Warren and Clermont. Those went for Cheneybush last year by margins of 72% and 71%, respectively. They could fairly be said to have played a pivotal role in keeping the Rovians in the White House, given that the combined GOP margin -- almost 80,000 votes -- accounted for two-thirds of Cheneybush's entire statewide edge over Kerry.

The ability of the Rovians to pull fresh GOP votes out of those two counties certainly challenged plausibility, and, in Clermont's case, almost defied mathematics. Consider the fact that according to the Census Bureau, Clermont's population rose only 4.4% (about 7,800 souls) between 2000 and 2003, while reported GOP turnout increased by roughly 31% (about 14,600 votes) from 2000 to 2004. This in a county that only had about 122,000 registered voters last year, according to the Cincinatti Enquirer. Mr. Diebold must be very proud.

The Republicans claim that "morals" issues (read: the horror of males kissing males) drove all those voters into the red column. However, polls indicate that, contrary to popular belief, "moral issues" were not a major driving force in the election.

Summary of a great article. Previously, we mentioned Mark Crispen Miller's fine new piece, "None Dare Call It Stolen," in this month's Harpers -- and not available online. If you have a spare six bucks, the issue is worth your investment. But if the budget is tight (as it may well be, if you are working class and living in George Bush's America), Mary Anne Saucier has pieced together this precis. I don't think anyone will mind if I reprint much of it...

The Conyers report details the disenfranchisement of Democrats through “intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.”

There was unequal placement of voting machines.

County boards of elections were ordered to reject all Ohio voter-registration forms not printed on white, uncoated paper of not less than 80 lb. text weight.

Access was limited to provisional ballots.

“Caging” was used to challenge 35,000 individuals who did not sign for registered letters sent to new voters.

There was restriction of media from covering the election and conducting exit polls.

There was a prearranged FBI terrorist attack warning in Warren County which kept reporters from observing a post-election ballot-counting.

There was restriction of foreign monitors from “watching the opening of the polling places, the counting of the ballots, and, in some cases, the election itself.

Numerous statistical anomalies all deducted votes from Kerry.

In Cuyahoga and Franklin Counties, “the arrows on the absentee ballots were not properly aligned with their respective punch holes, so that countless votes were miscast.”

In Mercer County, 4000 votes were mysteriously not in the final count.

In Lucas County a polling place never opened because no one had the key.

In Hamilton County, many absentee voters could not vote for Kerry because his name was not on the ballot.

In Mahoning County 25 electronic machines changed Kerry votes to Bush.

Dirty tricks told voters to go to false polling places; that Democrats were to vote on November 3; volunteers offered to take absentee ballots to the election office; voters were challenged to prove eligibility to vote. The “Texas Strike Force” (25 people registered at a Franklin County Holiday Inn, paid by the Republican Party) threatened targeted people from a pay phone, if they voted.

Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell created rules for the Ohio recount (requested by the Green and Libertarian Parties) which would prevent “countywide hand recounts by any means necessary.” The end result was “the Ohio vote was never properly recounted, as required by Ohio law.”

On December 13, 2004, it was reported by Deputy Director of Hocking County Elections Sherole Eaton, that a Triad GSI employee had changed the computer that operated the tabulating machine, and had “advised election officials how to manipulate voting machinery to ensure that [the] preliminary hand recount matched the machine count.” This same Triad employee said he worked on machines in Lorain, Muskingum, Clark, Harrison, and Guernsey counties.

“Based on the above, including actual admissions and statements by Triad employees, it strongly appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a course of behavior to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets told them how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law. If true, this would frustrate the entire purpose of the recount law—to randomly ascertain if the vote counting apparatus is operating fairly and effectively, and if not to conduct a full hand recount.”

In Union County, Triad replaced the hard drive on one tabulator.

In Monroe County, “after the 3 percent hand count had twice failed to match the machine count, a Triad employee brought in a new machine and took away the old one. (That machine’s count matched the hand count.)”

Green and Libertarian volunteers reported that in Allen, Clermont, Cuyahoga, Morrow, Hocking, Vinton, Summit, and Medina counties, “the precincts for the 3 percent hand recount were preselected, not picked at random, as the law requires.”

Even though the 3 percent hand recount in Fairfield County was different than the machine count, there was no hand count as required.

“In Washington and Lucas counties, ballots were marked or altered, apparently to ensure that the hand recount would equal the machine count.”

“In Ashland, Portage, and Coshocton counties, ballots were improperly unsealed or stored.”

At great cost, Belmont County had an independent programmer change the counting machines so they would only count votes for President.

“..Democratic and/or Green observers were denied access to absentee, and /or provisional ballots, or were not allowed to monitor the recount process, in Summit, Huron, Putnam, Allen, Holmes, Mahoning, Licking, Stark, Medina, Warren, and Morgan counties.

Miller writes about the January 6, 2005 Electoral challenge from Ohio Representative Stephonie Tubbs-Jones and California Senator Barbara Boxer. He decries its rejection by the Congress and the press, with the Republicans calling the Democrats “troublemakers and cynical manipulators”, etc., etc.

According to Miller, “all this commentary was simply wrong” and “went unnoticed and/or unreported;” and with Bush’s re-inauguration “all inquiries were apparently concluded, and the story was officially kaput.” Miller emphasizes that, even after the National Election Data Archive Project, on March 31, 2005, “released its study demonstrating that the exit polls had probably been right, it made news only in the Akron Beacon-Journal,” while “the thesis that the exit polls were flawed had been reported by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Columbus Dispatch, CNN.com, MSNBC, and ABC..”